THE RELIGIOUS CONSULTATION
on population, reproductive health & ethics

The Guardian (London), June 26, 2004

Catholics, Condoms and Africa

BYLINE: Austen Ivereigh,
(deputy editor of the Tablet, a Catholic newspaper in England)

The Catholic church today finds itself in a curious position: while caring for a quarter of all Aids sufferers in sub-saharan Africa, it is accused of being a killer rather than a healer; by rejecting condoms in the battle against Aids, it stands charged with contributing to its spread.

The church argues that the only realistic and long-lasting response to Aids is a change in moral behaviour, one that rejects promiscuity and adheres to abstinence and fidelity in sexual relations. Condoms, it says, are not the solution, and it points to good evidence that campaigns promoting them in Africa have actually encouraged promiscuity - and thus fuelled the spread of Aids.

Catholic health and aid agencies in Africa say that Aids can only be dealt with by attacking its roots in war, poverty and the sexual abuse of women. And they point to the cruelty of Africans being deprived of access to anti-retroviral therapy, which, in the west, has meant Aids is no longer seen as a certain killer. Provide such treatment, they say, and you break the cycle of stigma and despair which often lies behind the promiscuity and abusive behaviour that cause Aids to spiral.

This is a powerful witness. But it has been undermined by the church's refusal, officially, to concede that in some circumstances the use of a condom may be not just licit but obligatory.

Tomorrow's BBC Panorama programme carries an interview with a Catholic woman in Uganda who has chosen to sleep unprotected with her infected husband: "We won't go to heaven if we use condoms," she explains. Asked if the woman made the right choice, the Archbishop of Kampala, Cardinal Emmanuel Wamala, replies: "If it is wrong to use the condom, then she has made the right choice." Even if it costs her her life? "Yes," replies the cardinal. "That is a harsh teaching," the reporter responds.

It is also misguided. Moral theologians agree that what makes a condom good or bad is the use to which it is put; if it is being used to prevent the transmission of death, then it is not contraceptive in intention. The doctrine of double effect holds that some good actions have bad, unintended consequences, but if the primary intention is good, it remains valid.

For this reason, the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae accepted the legitimacy of taking the birth-control pill for a medical, rather than a contraceptive, purpose - to regulate menstrual cycles rather than to prevent pregnancy. In the case of Aids, it can be argued that there is a positive moral obligation on an infected person to don a contraceptive.

'Someone who is infected with the HIV virus, and decides to have sex with an uninfected person, has to protect his partner by using a condom," the Archbishop of Brussels, Cardinal Godfried Danneels, said in January. If that person is promiscous, the act of putting on a condom may be a positive moral act. To Rome, that may smack of moral relativism; but morality is a journey, and it must start somewhere.

No European or American cardinal would dare to follow the line taken by the Archbishop of Kampala. Even if they did not go as far as Danneels, they would stress the importance of conscience. So another casualty of the controversy is the obvious injustice that while Catho-lics in the west are, in effect, allowed a conscience, African Catholics are not.

Rome's refusal to modify its stance on condoms in the light of Aids has much to do with the longstanding impasse over its ban on artificial contraception. Pope John Paul II has made adherence to Humanae Vitae a touchstone of orthodoxy and obedience; there is an in-built resistance in the Vatican to any attempt to soften the condom ban in the light of the new circumstances of Aids.

But if that explains Rome's callous intransigence, it does not justify it. By its refusal to deal with human realities, the church has muffled its own prophetic voice on Aids, and encouraged the conclusion that Christian teaching that can only be upheld at the cost of African lives does not deserve that name.

Austen Ivereigh is deputy editor of the Tablet

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